Some Thoughts Concerning a Palestinian-Arab Worshiper and his Pile of Rocks

...What is truly disgraceful and disheartening, however, is Israel's complicity in the discrimination against all non-Muslims on the Temple Mount. It undermines everything that Israel allegedly stands for. If Israel is the national homeland of the Jewish people, how is it that we gave away our holiest site to people who vow to drive us from our own land?

Michael Lumish..
Israel Thrives..
16 September '15..

Nothing says "holy" so much as stock-piling primitive weaponry in the Al-Aqsa mosque to be used for violence against Jews.

The Temple Mount issue is of particular fun because it is particularly unjust. We are told that the holiest place within the Jewish tradition also happens to be the "third holiest site in Islam." I have not dug into this question as much as I will need to, but I wonder just when Al-Aqsa became the third holiest site within Islam?

The Temple Mount has been the holiest site for religious Jews for over three thousand years because it is the site of the First and Second Temples. It represents where the Jewish people come from. Just when - I wonder to myself aloud - did it become the third holiest site in Islam?

My guess, in historical terms, is a quarter past last Tuesday.

My suspicion, and I have yet to verify this, is that this notion of Al-Aqsa as "the third holiest" whatever is a recent invention designed specifically to challenge Jewish claims to Jewish heritage on Jewish land.

In the nineteenth century, prior to the rise of modern Zionism, the Temple Mount was desolate. Jerusalem, itself was desolate. The Arabs did not care about either until the Jews sought to save ourselves and our families through returning home to the Land of Israel after centuries of persecution by Europeans... not to mention Arabs.

Obama's Peace Process and the Palestinians' "Car Intifada"

...Moreover, it would also be a good idea for Obama and Kerry to go online and view the most recent Palestinian campaigns that encourage and applaud terror attacks on Israelis. Perhaps then they will understand that as long as the incitement continues, there is no chance — zero — for the success of any peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
07 November '14..

It began as a "children's intifada" in Jerusalem, where Palestinians aged eight to 18 were encouraged to take to the streets and throw stones and shoot fireworks at vehicles driven by Israelis and policemen.

Now, however, Palestinians are referring to it as a "car intifada" after two Palestinian drivers deliberately ran over Israelis in Jerusalem over the past two weeks.

The "car intifada," which has claimed the lives of four Israelis, including a three-month-old infant, is being hailed by many Palestinians as a "natural response to Israeli crimes."

The "crimes" they are referring to are visits by Jewish groups and individuals to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Authority [PA], Hamas and Islamic Jihad are using these visits to stir up Palestinians against Israel. The recent terror attacks in Jerusalem are the direct result of this campaign of incitement.

The widow of Ibrahim Akkari, the 48-year-old Palestinian who drove his car into a group of Israelis in Jerusalem on November 5, said that her husband was influenced by TV scenes of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli policemen at the Temple Mount.

The widow, Amira, said that her husband carried out the attack in retaliation against Israeli "assaults" on the Aqsa Mosque. "He was martyred for the sake of the Aqsa Mosque," she said.

Recent statements by PA President Mahmoud Abbas may also have convinced Akkari to go out and run over Israelis. Two weeks before the attack, Abbas called on Palestinians to "use all means" to protect the Aqsa Mosque.

"It is not enough to say the settlers came (to the Temple Mount), but they must be barred from entering the compound by any means. This is our Aqsa, and they have no right to enter it and desecrate it," Abbas told Fatah activists during a meeting in his Ramallah office.

As if not enough, Abbas indirectly encouraged Palestinians to resort to violence against Israel by praising the Palestinian who shot and severely wounded activist Rabbi Yehuda Glick in Jerusalem on October 29.

A special Israeli police unit caught up with the shooter a few hours later and killed him in a gunfight.

In a letter to the family of the would-be assassin, Mu'taz Hijazi, Abbas wrote: "With anger, we have received the news of the vicious assassination crime committed by the terrorists of the Israeli occupation army against your son, who will go to heaven as a martyr defending the rights of our people and its holy sites."

The letter of condolences contradicts Abbas's promise to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to work toward calming the situation and refrain from fiery rhetoric that leads to more violence and bloodshed.

What is more disturbing is the widespread support among Palestinians for the recent terror attacks in Jerusalem.

This support is being expressed mostly on social media, where Palestinian activists have launched campaigns that praise the perpetrators and encourage others to follow suit.

The "Run Over Intifada" - The Same Futile Aim

...But, as they have demonstrated consistently since the time of the mufti, what they want to shake off is not the supposedly oppressive rule of Israel (which, as even Rudoren notes, allows a Palestinian prosperity that makes many of them reluctant to contemplate another destructive and pointless war), but the presence of the Jews altogether and intolerance for their presence. Once again a new generation of Palestinians are taking up gasoline bombs and even using cars as weapons in order to kill or injure Jews to further that same futile aim and in the name of this ancient hatred.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
06 October '14..

In the wake of the latest acts of terror against pedestrians in Jerusalem, Palestinian public opinion is again reacting with the same sensitivity that it displayed back in June when a popular campaign mocked the plight of three Jewish teenagers who were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas terrorists. Support for the “run over intifada” is endemic on Palestinian social media in much the same way as it cheered the prospect that the lives of the three boys might be bartered for the freedom of captured terrorists. But instead of pondering whether support for the spate of attacks is, as the New York Times speculates today, a new intifada “for the 21st Century, foreign observers would do well to understand that this violence is merely a symptom of the same refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy that has fueled the conflict for many decades.

Though she recycles Palestinian myths about the reasons for the outbreak of the first two intifadas (including the infamous lie that it was Ariel Sharon’s walk on the Temple Mount rather than a calculated response by Yasir Arafat to Israeli peace moves), Times Jerusalem Bureau chief Jodi Rudoren didn’t find many who thought this outbreak was likely to result in a repeat of the carnage of the second intifada that took thousands of lives on both sides. Indeed, she did her readers a service by reminding them that the security fence built to stop suicide bombers makes a return to the horror of that episode problematic for the architects of terror.

But if she really wanted to explain the origins of the current round of violence revolving around Palestinian anger about the efforts of a minority of Israeli to reverse the ban on Jewish prayer on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount — the holiest site in Judaism as well as the home of the Al-Aksa Mosque — she would do well to go back further in history than 1987 or 2000. Conspiracy theories about Jews planning to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount go back to the efforts of Haj Amin el-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and Nazi ally who led the Palestinians throughout the 1920s, 30s and 40s, to foment anti-Jewish pogroms long before there was a State of Israel, let alone an “occupation.”

Though Rudoren quotes Palestinian Authority Leader Mahmoud Abbas as saying that he doesn’t want another intifada, she fails to mention his efforts to follow in the mufti’s footsteps by urging his people to resist Jews by any means and calling a terrorist who attempted to murder a Jewish activist rabbi, a martyr who went straight to heaven. Yet it’s true that Abbas doesn’t want an intifada since a collapse of security cooperation between Israel and the PA might result in a Hamas coup that could cost him life or at least his control of the West Bank. Despite his incitement of violence, it is still he Israelis who guarantee his personal security. What Rudoren also fails to note is that it is Hamas that wants an intifada for the same reason it rained down thousands of missiles on Israeli cities this past summer even though it created more destruction for Palestinians in Gaza. Their goal is keep Palestinians focused on “resistance” — a synonym for endless war that won’t be solved by Israeli territorial concessions or even greater sensitivity for Muslim desire to deny Jews rights in Jerusalem.

Abbas, Incitement and the Temple Mount Fight

...Leaders on both sides should be doing all they can to keep Jerusalem calm, but peace can’t be bought by agreeing to a segregated apartheid-like ban on Jews visiting or living in some places. Rather than acquiescing to such dangerous attitudes, the U.S. should be sending a sharp message to Muslims that they must learn to live with their Jewish neighbors and share the city. But so long as Washington is shooting insults at Israel you can be sure that more violence and incitement is likely to follow.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
30 October '14..

Israel was back in the cross-hairs of both the international media and the Arab and Muslim worlds today after violence led to a temporary shutdown of access to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and its mosques. Condemnations of the Jewish state came in hot and heavy from various Islamic sources and even Jordan, a country that has a peace treaty with Israel and is dependent on it for security cooperation. Few bothered to mention, let alone condemn, the attempted murder of a Jewish activist that led to the closure or the drumbeat of incitement from Palestinian leaders that helped create the trouble. But while, as our Seth Mandel pointed out, the shooting generated biased media coverage that drew on the same themes as those inciting the violence, there is more to unwrap here than that. The obsessive focus on keeping Jews out of Judaism’s most sacred site and indeed, out of much of Jerusalem tells us all we need to know about why peace is nowhere in sight.

From the frame of reference of those critical of Israelis in the quarrel over both their capital and the Temple Mount, the notion of Jews moving to parts of the city or visiting or even praying on the plateau above the Western Wall is deeply provocative. Arab sensibilities are inflamed by the presence of Jews in either majority-Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem or those that are predominantly Arab. They are especially outraged by the spectacle of Jews walking around the Temple Mount in the vicinity of the mosques or, as is currently forbidden, praying there.

Most of the West accepts this way of looking at events as inherently reasonable and those, like the Jew who was shot yesterday, that advocate Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount or Israeli leaders who believe that Jews have every right to live in any part of their ancient capital that they want are termed extremist disturbers of the peace. Indeed, Jordanian King Abdullah, who finds himself compelled to verbally attack Israel because most of his subjects are opposed to the peace treaty and are unimpressed by the fact that it is the Jewish state that is the real guarantor of their ability to hold off ISIS and other Islamists, said that both Jewish and Islamic extremism was to blame for the problem.